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What To Do When a Product Fails To Sell

Let me quickly state that I may not have all the answers (nobody does) but this question struck me when a product my publishing business launched in the not too distant past failed to even take off the ground. It pains to see products that took months, in some cases years and sizeable amount of money to develop and yet it refuses to crawl not to talk of run.

The natural reaction when a product fails is to push the blame to the consumers. I felt bad and believed that the failure of the product was neither my fault nor my firm’s. I had done everything I ought to do but people who needed my product simply refused to buy. But that was a wrong approach to take. I soon realized I had to do something about the product or let it go to waste entirely.

The next I did was to reduce the price of the product by almost half but I soon got to know that price had little or nothing to do with the failure of many products. I abandoned the whole project and tagged it a failure.

Sometimes walking away from a failed project and diverting your mind’s energy to something else helps. You can then take a long look at the project with an unbiased mind. Thinking from a distance I discovered some home truths. One of the most compelling facts I discovered was that I was very impatient and quite in a hurry to make that product sell and it reflected in everything I did. It was a book published by my own publishing firm so I had all the reasons why it should sell;
There was no other book like around
It addressed a problem that over a million people had.
There was no way they wouldn’t want it

Sometimes, the harsh realities of business pulls us all down from our dreaming loft in the moon to the real facts of what is obtainable. I saw that I was too self centred on that particular product. I grew so much in love with the product that I already thought every other person should

When these things happen what you need is a change of perspective . With the help of my team, the firm came up with a better attempt at understanding the market and I went back to give the book one more push. Ever so slowly it began to move. We came up with more ways of pushing that book and things took shape. The book wasn’t really one of the resoundingly successful products we had but the fact that it sold modestly when what we had earlier on our hands was dead duck goes to show that a change in perspective and then persistence helps in turning a dead product around.

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